​TL/DR

​New here? This is the monthly gathering for our London community of practice for long-term thinking, at The RSA’s cocktail bar, Muse. 🍸

​📬 Please do RSVP here as it is important for us to be able to help our hosts prepare for us.

​​📖 Some context: There’s no required reading, but you may like to read a little about Longplayer, or listen to a podcast about the John Cage Organ Project, or watch a video about the Time Pyramid.

​More detail below (including more about this month’s theme). We hope to see you there.

​~ Chris D

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​🍹Our monthly gatherings

​​Long Now London is a group of people who share an interest in long-term thinking.  We have been gathering in a variety of formats, locations and frequencies since 02008. Since 02018 we have met on the second Thursday of the month, usually in a pub, sometimes in a park, and online when necessary. 🍻

​​🌎 We are an independent local group inspired by the work of the Long Now Foundation and using their name with permission. 

​We do a variety of things throughout the year, but our monthly gatherings encourage conversations about long-term thinking, 📡 deep time, 🏺 history, 🖌️ art, 🔭 futures, 🛰️ technology, 🔧 maintenance, a wide range of -ologies and -isms depending on the crowd. 🔎

​🌍 We are in regular dialogue with other such groups around the world. 🌏 If you would like to be put in touch with like-minded people where you are, please do get in touch.

​Oh, and we write the year with an additional digit at the front to guard against the deca-millennium bug; 🦠 to encourage our minds towards further horizons, and also because it’s fun.

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​Where

​In recent months we have been meeting at ​Muse - the cocktail bar in RSA House. The RSA (The royal society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce) has been around since 01754. You can find out more about their work here.  

​At the start of the evening you can access Muse via the main RSA entrance on John Adam Street, but after a certain point you will have to enter via the designated door round the corner on Adam Street (not John Adam Street!). At that door, press the buzzer and they will come and let you in ASAP. Say you are there for Long Now and you will be directed to us (most likely filling their second room).

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​Theme and suggested reading 

​🥸 What did future generations ever do for me? - Groucho Marx

​🔮 This month we’re flipping that around and asking: What can art (& culture) do for future generations?

​🎨 We’ve been using one word titles for the last few months but this month worried that just calling this one “art” might scare a few people off. Whether you are someone for whom art and artistic practice are a major life focus or an area you prefer to leave to others, we would love to have your perspective in this month’s conversations.

​One of our emergent Long Now London traditions is an annual trip to “Chalk the Horse”, an activity that last year was included in an exhibition of “Art & Culture for Future Generations” at the UN Headquarters in NYC, USA. Also in the exhibition were other organisations provisionally termed “Long-Term Art Projects (LTAPs for now!). One of these LTAPs is Longplayer, which on Saturday 5th April will be celebrating its 25th year of a 1,000 year musical cycle with a 1,000 minute performance at the Roundhouse. Representatives of several other LTAPs will be in London that weekend in order to attend.

​Earlier this year BBC Radio 4 aired an excellent one-off show called The Futureseekers, looking at multigenerational scientific experiments. Now we want to be thinking about multigenerational (and, vitally, intergenerational) artworks.

​Several of us have also been reading “What Art Does”, the new (short) book by Bette Adriaanse and Brian Eno, so that will probably come up in conversation too.

​Last month, a few people noted that amidst all the usual wonderful diversity of topics, they didn’t actually get around to discussing the theme. So this month we’ll be encouraging more of that… or you could just dive into the topic yourself and see what happens?! We have also started using Artefact cards to both start and record conversations. As ever, our practices are emergent from the community and we’d love to hear your thoughts.